U.S. Pat. No. 6,058,417 disclosed a method and apparatus for information presentation and management in an online trading environment where the images can be harvested from a plurality of sites based upon user-supplied information, including descriptions of items for sale and locations from which images that are to be associated with the items can be retrieved. Then, thumbnail images are created corresponding to the harvested images and aggregated onto a web page for presentation at a remote site. Similarly, upon a query from a user, thumbnail images corresponding to items that satisfy the user query are displayed, each of the thumbnail images previously having been created based upon a user-specified image. While the above patent disclosed an interface with arranged thumbnail images for online trading environment, the above patent does not disclose the application of the disclosed technique to the technical document analysis and to the reading management interface. Hence, the above patent does not disclose the technique of capturing the diagrams or images contained in technical documents.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,963,966 disclosed an automated capture of technical documents for electronic review and distribution, by using OCR to dissect the technical documents into drawing files and text files, and filing to appropriate locations for storage or display. However, the use of OCR to scan the entire technical document will consume a large amount of system resource and has a low yield rate.
The research and development team usually performs a lot of documents searching and reading in the initial stage of technical development. For example, Taiwan Patent Publication No. 200417882 disclosed a method for generating patent analysis data, by looking up in an external database to capture a plurality of patents or classification numbers, and then performing patent analysis and relevance linkage according to the patents, classification numbers, and feature information.
FIG. 1 shows an exemplary flowchart of Taiwan Patent No. 567432 of a system and method for mining and statistical analyzing patent information. As shown in FIG. 1, the user selects analysis type and sets the analysis conditions via a client interface. The analysis conditions are translated by an application software server into inquiry conditions of specific format. The inquiry conditions are used to search the database, and the search result is transmitted by the application software server to the client computer to display the analysis result.
In the patent information analysis, usually as shown in FIG. 2, the list mode is used to display the related information of the technical documents, such as document, title, document number, application date, publication date, published date, issue date of patent, author/inventor, assignee, and so on. If a reader wants to obtain further information, the reader must enter the subject to read the abstract or even entire document of text and drawings to know whether the document is of interest and relevance. This takes much time and more system resource for data reading and processing, thus becomes a major performance bottleneck for the research team.
Therefore, it remains an important issue as to how to save system resource and effectively integrate the documents in a plurality of technical databases and effectively analyze the contents and the trends of technical documents.
The aforementioned techniques only disclose the capturing of the data from the external database to the local database or server for analysis, but neither disclose the use of the relevance operation of documents of the external database nor provide the reader with an image of fast information digestion or required interactive commentating platform to share comments and reviews to improve the technical data reading efficiency.